


After Our Likeness

by SimplexityJane



Series: In the Beginning [5]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 06:25:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1768963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Genesis 1:26 KJV</p>
<p>Tony's math is never wrong. That doesn't mean he's infallible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Our Likeness

**Author's Note:**

> This newest installment of this series is from Tony's point of view (can you see a pattern developing?). It's mostly stand-alone, but it does reference things from the other fics. This delves a little more into the accident, so for a person I headcanon as an atheist, there's an awful lot of praying. 
> 
> Warnings: A non-graphic description of an accident involving a child resulting in a disability. An off-screen extremely justified murder following a non-graphic shooting scene.

Tony lives his life on probabilities and percentages. He always has, since he was four years old and the circuit board he built had a 43 percent chance of failure, because he'd built it out of his toys and certain things were _never_ meant to conduct electricity.

When he’s fourteen he has ( _they_ say) a 9 percent chance of getting into MIT. In reality that’s a 99.2 percent chance, the .8 there because they might not want to take a kid, or someone who, it could be argued, only got in because of favoritism. When he gets his acceptance letter and the bill, because he forewent academic scholarships—better someone else who is slightly less brilliant gets it, since they most definitely need it more—his mother hugs him and says she knew it all along. His father (who Tony will someday understand never understood people like he understood machines, somewhat like Tony) nods and lets Tony see his “hidden” grin.

It’s a rare moment in the Stark household. Out of all their interactions, his father only smiles at him .2 percent of the time. It’s what his grandfather did too, raised Howard to _be a man_ , but Tony figures out _that’s_ bullshit in 1985.

Still, he’s fifteen and scrawny and no one wants him, 0.0 percent because everyone knows Howard Stark would murder anyone “preying” on his son, and Tony’s frustrated and ends up at Rhodey’s.

Rhodey got into MIT when he was sixteen, so he gets it a little. He’s eighteen, though, and people actually like him because he’s in ROTC and takes engines apart in his spare time, so he doesn’t look eighteen.

(Tony has a crush, but there’s only a 2.6 percent chance Rhodey will ever do anything about that, and that chance zips down to zero because he wants to go into the military. Tony likes Rhodey, so he accepts that.)

Tony graduates summa cum laude, with a degree in engineering and mathematics. It doesn’t mean anything because everyone knows he’s going into the company, probably R&D and then slowly and surely “gaining” power. 

It’s stupid. Tony’s owned ten percent of Stark stock since he got into MIT. He already _has_ the power.

3.285 percent of the time, Tony Stark is wrong.

It’s 1989, and his parents are dead. In the rain there was a twenty percent probability of their car skidding out, but Tony’s seen the car. Its breaks were cut, and someone covered that up.

His parents were murdered, and he’s standing here while Obie gives a speech obliviously. He’s drunk during the daytime for the first time in his life (“Don’t ever get drunk while the sun’s up, kid,” Howard said, handing him his first alcoholic beverage, a glass of wine, when he was ten years old. His mom nodded and laughed when he sputtered around it.), and no one notices except Rhodey, who got special leave from the Air Force.

“It’s because of Stark, right?” Tony asks, and Rhodey scowls at him. “Not you, Rhodey, obviously not you, but the Air Force isn’t exactly--” He can’t find the word.

“Probably,” Rhodey admits. It’s the first time they sort of kind of admit that the Air Force is what’s going to keep their friendship alive, and it’s because they want the best toys.

Tony gives them the best toys because he loves Rhodey. Rhodey is his brother, okay, not his friend, after everything they’ve gotten into together. Howard focused on the Army, and yes, Stark still sells to them, and they’re in the shit, especially now, but everyone knows the Air Force gets preferential treatment. Some people have a problem with that.

Tony has controlling interest in the company (himself 42 percent, and Obie another fifteen), so fuck them.

“I think women should be allowed in combat,” he says one day, and explains what he means. He has a thirty percent chance of actually changing things, but this story ramps it up to 46.8. “My mother was in combat. Not officially, and they refused to pay her even what they paid Privates, and she was untrained, but she was there. Women have fought in every war, and they’ve fought without the training and supplies that their male comrades have. My mother only got out of the war alive because she was with Captain America, and Peggy Carter required everyone to have Stark weapons. If we can’t afford women the transparency of admitting they’re going to fight, we cannot equip them for that.”

“You are fucking welcome, Danvers,” Tony says when she calls. There’s silence for three, two, one seconds, then:

“I don’t understand you, Tony,” she says. “But thank you.”

Pepper Potts comes in with an accounting error, and Tony falls in love with her. She doesn’t take the bait of any of his flirting, and it’s at that moment that he decides she needs to rule the world. 

He makes her his PA. She complains without saying a negative word.

“You are so full of shit,” Rhodey, newly a Captain, says when he explains his plan for Pepper’s world domination. “I thought _I_ was gonna rule the world, huh?”

“And that plan is coming together very well,” he says, confused. “You’re going to be a five star general, remember? That was the end of that plan, right?”

Rhodey smiles at him, but it’s sad, like he thinks Tony can’t make that happen. Tony is playing the long game on this one, though, and Rhodey _will_ rule the Air Force, if nothing else.

Tony makes sure Pepper’s name is the one everyone knows, all those good old boys in suits who can’t help but be impressed with her math. It’s going to take more than a decade, but he thinks he’ll be able to name her his successor without any trouble. By the time he’s ready to retire Obie is going to be like a hundred years old, so _he_ should be fine with it, and Pepper was _born_ for politics.

The plan for Rhodey goes well. He gets promoted to Major, then Lt. Col., and he’s coming up on twenty years’ experience so they ask if he wants to retire. He doesn’t, because he’s finally realized that Tony’s master plan is perfect (“I’m staying so you don’t piss someone else off, Tony, and because I like flying,” he says, and Tony grins at him.).

Then everything happens too quickly. Tony’s lifespan suddenly gets four decades cut off, and Rhodey sends him books on PTSD because he believes that’s why Tony doesn’t want to be involved with the military. Tony measures his blood toxicity levels (it’s not really twenty percent of his blood, it’s twenty percent of what _will_ kill him, and he knows the day he’s going to die, has a pretty good idea of the hour) and he tries to tell Rhodey and Pepper. He loves them both, Pepper like she’s a planet and he’s her moon, Rhodey like a big brother.

He doesn’t want to die. There is a 99.99 percent chance he will.

But like with MIT, like those .2 percent of times his dad smiled at him, .01 percent is enough for Tony Stark.

He calls it Pepperonium, both for Pepper and for pepperoni, and the scientific community gives him his third doctorate (the second was for the miniature arc reactor, and the first was for a few theorems he solved in the haze of the nineties). They side-eye his name choice _so hard_ , but Tony doesn’t care. It gets approved.

He nearly dies with only three doctorates. He doesn’t have the time to calculate the chances of survival, but he’s pretty sure they were somewhere in the 0.0 region.

 “So, Pepper, meet Steve, otherwise known as Captain America,” Tony says once Pepper lands in New York and bullies someone into letting her into Stark Tower.

“You almost died again,” she says, and her tone is icy. He does a quick calculation, and there is a 13.72 percent chance that she won’t care that they’re in public or that she’s not a violent person and she’ll slap him anyway. Luckily, Captain America is an excellent deterrent for bad behavior. He steps up and offers his hand to Pepper, who raises an eyebrow at him.

“Ma’am,” he says, and her eyebrow arches even further. “It’s an honor meeting you.”

“And yourself, Captain Rogers. I have to berate my partner, so if you’ll excuse me.”

Partner. It’s a nice word, one they’ve tossed around before. _Husband_ is out of the picture for so many reasons, and boyfriend is wrong, obviously, but he likes partner. He smiles at Pepper while she explains why people don’t go through portals on national television, a list of reasons ranging from stock drops to her having a panic attack when she realized he was trying to call her.

“Also, you promised no more nearly dying when I moved in, remember?” she says. His word doesn’t usually mean much, but to Pepper it’s everything.

“To be fair, I didn’t want your building to get blown up,” he says, and that’s it, there are waterworks, and they’re making out like teenagers in front of Bruce, Romanoff, Hawkeye, and _Captain America_. The only thing that could make this worse would be if Rhodey flew in. “Hey, where is our friendly neighborhood Colonel, by the way?”

“Protecting the President,” Pepper says.

“Ah,” Tony says, and hugs Pepper for a second before she detaches herself and starts on damage control. He knows he has an utterly smitten look on his face, because Rogers actually _grins_ at him.

“She reminds me of someone I knew,” he says, and Tony nods.

“Peggy was really cool. She and my mom stayed friends after the war.” Mom is a safe topic, and Peggy must be, if Rogers is bringing her up. He raises his eyebrows in question. “To you, she was Agent Maria Carbonell. She used to tell us the story of how she stole your first kiss.”

Huh. Rogers has a blush that goes down his neck.

“Well, she didn’t.” And _that’s_ interesting.

There is a 20 percent chance that Pepper will explode, so far as Tony knows, but she doesn’t. She’s like a phoenix, rising from the ashes to kill the monster who did this to her, and Tony thinks that even though she was perfect before, she’s perfect now, too.

He stabilizes Extremis’s nastier effects, has open heart surgery, and injects himself with another form of it. There’s only a two percent chance _he’ll_ explode.

Suddenly he’s a wifi hotspot, but things don’t really change. Not until he goes looking into S.H.I.E.L.D. because they arrested Steve, and he finds out exactly who had his parents killed. He’s working on a new suit when Insight goes live, and he tries to connect to them in a last ditch effort to get his and Pepper’s names off the list—goes cold when he finds Bruce’s too, because there’s no way in hell that attack would end well, and are they _serious_? Five minutes into their new world order and someone who was a coward before would suddenly turn into a hero, because martyrs are _important_.

Even a hundred years later and HYDRA’s still _stupid_.

“Erik, Charles,” he says, watching the carriers rise with one eye and flipping through Iron Man designs with the other.

“What’s wrong, Tony?” Charles says. Tony likes him better than he likes Erik, even though he can read minds, because Erik has a habit of screwing up electronics as well as metal.

“We may or may not be about to go to war,” he says. “You should warn your students with passive powers, and get the shields up at your schools. Or send Polaris or someone else with magnetic abilities to Washington, because if shit gets real we need to control the death toll—we’re talking millions right now.”

“Well, fuck,” Charles says. It’s always surprising when he curses. “I’ve turned on the news, and I checked; they seem to have a plan in place that’s going well—but Polaris is in Washington already, ready to take action.”

Tony closes his eyes and thanks some form of god. He’s not sure which one, honestly. Maybe the god of math, whichever one that is.

The next day he sends a message to Steve, _Backup was in place if you died, thanks for not doing that._

He gets a smileyface emoticon back. Steve is an asshole, he’s found out.

Tony carefully wipes everything on Iron Man and Stark Industries from the internet, going so far as to invade the servers of certain hackers and offer them jobs while he does it. He lets himself calculate the odds of this happening again—a whopping 88.9 percent chance, because HYDRA is _still out there_ , and he sends the statistics to the mutants.

Pepper starts something she’s just calling Defense, and that chance goes down to 62.3 percent.

“I want to hire every telepath who’s willing,” she tells Charles, who drinks scotch and nods while Erik starts writing down names. “ _Everyone_ who’s willing, actually. We need to have a real defense system for meta-humans in place, and we _can’t_ let double agents in.”

Defense is a nice place, and Tony’s clearance level is higher than Rhodey’s for a whole month before he politely asks the President for a better one.

The failure rate of condoms is actually 12 percent.

It’s sort of ironic.

“I don’t think this was in either of our life plans,” Pepper says. Tony shakes his head, already ordering books on pregnancy that won’t matter because _they_ _aren’t human_. He wishes he could get drunk, and he looks at Pepper, who probably wishes the same thing. “I think we can do this, though, right?” she asks.

“Right,” he says.

He has his freakout with Bruce instead of Pepper because he doesn’t have the right to a freakout anyway, and Bruce has the patience of a saint.

Everything really boils down to him being afraid that he’ll be like his father, and Bruce just stares at him for a second after he admits that.

“Tony, you aren’t your father, despite how much you look like him,” Bruce says. “You’ll do fine.”

James Yinsen Potts is the most beautiful baby Tony has ever met, and the second his eyes open his mind connects with the signals Tony’s is putting out. Tony laughs, and carefully censors everything that comes through that particular line.

“He’s Extremis positive,” Tony says, and Pepper sighs, smiling. It turns out her body is more adept at handling labor than human women’s, so she’ll be completely fine in an hour.

“I already knew that,” she says. “He’s warm.”

Jay—they know so many people named James, and 0.0 percent of them go by their names, so why should he—is a genius. Every parent probably thinks that about their kid, but Tony knows he’s right. The machines respond to him, and from what Tony can tell he learns Binary as a first language before he ever opens his mouth.

This doesn’t worry Tony, not even when he’s non-verbal until he’s two years old because of it, because they’re communicating already. Jay is a ball of energy and love that Tony will kill for, and Tony showers him with affection. Everyone in the Tower, even the Barnes-Rogers we-like-kids-just-far-far-away brigade, loves Jay. Natasha is training him to be a spy.

When Steve gets shot Jay says his first word.

“No!” he shouts, and the bullets dig themselves out of his chest. Tony and Erik had both been going for them, but Jay gets there first, and it’s all chaos after that.

“Please don’t do this in my home, where my child can see it,” Tony says, and Bucky agrees. Everyone knows what happens to Norman Osborne, but no one sees the act itself. Everyone agrees that it was a justifiable homicide, so Bucky doesn’t get charged with anything, and Steve gets better, so it’s not like anything really changes.

Jay just starts talking, and he doesn’t ever stop.

“Just like his father,” Pepper says.

Darcy Lewis, aka The Scary One, watches Jay sometimes, and she always talks to him. She and Natasha are together (Natasha is known as The Scary One’s Scarier Girlfriend), and somehow it works. It’s like Natasha is a whole different person now, not just a cover, and Tony thinks he likes her a little better this way. Enough that he doesn’t raise hell when he finds out she’s Jay’s godmother.

Rhodey’s his godfather, obviously.

Jay is eight when he has his accident. They’re in the lab, and there are safety protocols in place, but no protocol can protect a kid who’s blown something up in his face, and it’s all Tony can do to not panic as he calls for a doctor.

“Please be okay,” he prays, instead of trying to find math that says this ends well. He doesn’t know who he’s praying to, but when Jay wakes up his cameras focus on Tony, and he smiles even though he feels like crying.

There was a 0.0 percent chance he would regain his sight, but Jay _did_. This is a bigger miracle than the Maximoff twins could come up with in a year.

Tony doesn’t teach Jay how to calculate his likelihood of survival in a horrible situation. He thinks maybe Jay won’t need to know.


End file.
